The latest sample, which showed up in my mailbox at the Daily Breeze newsroom this week, is a new novel called “Pacific Avenue” by Anne L. Watson, a retired preservation consultant who specialized in historic architecture. She was affiliated with the Torrance-based Melvyn Green and Associates restoration firm.

Watson now lives in Olympia, Wash., but has lived in San Pedro in the past – twice. Once in the late 1980s and again from about 1998-2001.

“I’ve always loved San Pedro; I really felt at home there,” the author said in a telephone interview.

“It seemed to speak to me,” said Watson, who lived on Denison Avenue both times she lived in Pedro.

“I’m a walker and it was a nice place to walk. I’d walk every morning down to Point Fermin and White Point, or even farther. I liked the way it seemed to be right at the edge of the city yet was in a way a small town.”

This is Watson’s first novel, which took her five years to write, although she earlier wrote an epistolary novel – also set in San Pedro – “Skeeter: A Cat Tale.”

Her latest work began as an essay about why Watson liked Pacific Avenue.

But it quickly grew.

“I was describing Pacific Avenue and then the main character came into my mind and started `talking,”‘ she said.

“I was more or less taking dictation and when I got through, I had written the first chapter of a novel.”

I haven’t read the book, which will be officially released on Feb.1, but had to smile at noticing right way, on page 11, there was a reference to the “News-Pilot,” the daily newspaper that served San Pedro for so many years.

While staying clear of using real names, the opening chapter does evoke the area as it was 30 years ago.

Here’s the description of the lead character, Kathy Woodbridge, a young woman on the run from her past, getting off the bus at Seventh and Pacific, the “end of the line,” as she calls it.

“Seventh Street looked quieter . … But after the first block, the buildings thinned out and the street plunged downhill toward a gleam of water. Silhouettes of tall cranes made black Xs against the evening sky. Like scissors, waiting to cut it into strips. Nothing but the port down there. Nothing there for me.”

Back up on Pacific Avenue, looking for a place to stay, she narrates:

“All I saw was stores. I passed the Thrif-T-Mart, with its displays of sun-bleached plastic housewares. The Angel Bakery – a wedding cake behind plate glass, a ventilator spewing the scent of sugar and grease. Next door, a boarded-up entryway added a reek of stale pee. A pigeon flapped past my face. … I scanned the signs, but some of them meant nothing to me – Baile, Mariscos, Menudo Hoy. For all I knew, any of those might have meant rooms.

“I hesitated a couple times, but the places didn’t look like boarding houses, so I walked on by.

“… In the block after that, I rested beside a storefront – the Salvation Army, used Christmases for sale. The dinged-up manger scene in the window was nothing like my family – the mother, the father and the baby were all there. …”

The book is 316 pages long and is set in the early 1970s. Other settings include New Orleans, where Watson was from originally.

According to the forward, it explores the themes of “love, belonging, helpfulness, hope, reconciliation, interracial marriage, and healing from the trauma of war.”

The paperback book, published by Shepard & Piper, sells for $16. It’s available after Feb. 1 from Amazon and, I suspect, may wind up on the shelves of Williams Book Store in downtown San Pedro as well.

Donna Littlejohn has covered the Harbor Area as a reporter since 1981. Along with development, politics, coyotes, battleships and crime, she writes features that have spotlighted an array of topics, from an alligator on the loose in a city park to the modern-day cowboys who own the trails on the Palos Verdes Peninsula. She loves border collies and Aussie dogs, cats, early California Craftsman architecture and most surviving old stuff. She imagines the 1970s redevelopment sweep that leveled so much of San Pedro's historic waterfront district as very sad.